Pink
by Firestar9mm
Summary: Just like Claire, I am always the pink piece, or I do not play. It's in the rules. *smile* Leon/Claire, complete with slight Rebecca-bashing....please review!....


Pink  
  
*****  
  
Jill Valentine locked her eyes on the steely blue ones of her opponent. He returned her stare, never flinching.  
  
"You're going down, Redfield," she told him, in a voice laced with menace.  
  
"Not on your life, Valentine," that man assured her with a cocky smile.  
  
"Will you two cut the theatrics and just set up the board, please?" Claire asked with a sigh.  
  
Chris reached for the board, while Jill shook the bag with the pieces in it.  
  
"This could get ugly," Leon murmured to Claire, grinning.   
  
"They're scarier than lickers," Claire snickered back. "And Chris is about as goofy-looking."  
  
"I heard that," the elder Redfield said, trying to figure out how to unfold the Trivial Pursuit board.  
  
"Good, hear this," Jill interrupted. "Do you know you put the wedges in the pieces wrong the last time you played?" She waggled a round blue playing piece at him.  
  
"Well, let me remember back to 1985," Chris said, pretending to think very hard.  
  
"This could take a while," Barry Burton informed the other players with a chuckle. "Everybody get comfy."  
  
"It must have fossilized," Jill grumbled. "Get me some needle-nose pliers, stat."  
  
"That's my line," Rebecca Chambers giggled, emerging from the refrigerator with a bottle of diet soda. "Anybody else want some?"  
  
"No, thanks," Leon said.   
  
"I'm good," Barry said, sipping his beer.  
  
"I don't drink diet soda," Claire said. "It doesn't taste as good as the regular kind, and life's too short to count calories."  
  
Rebecca looked as though she'd like to correct Claire's logic, but didn't.  
  
"Anyway, I'm thinking of getting fat," Claire said.  
  
Leon chuckled. "Is that a new look for the summer?"  
  
"Yes. Come on, get fat with me. It'll be fun." Claire punched his shoulder lightly. "We can eat chocolate chips for breakfast."  
  
"I'm sold," Leon said, smiling at her.  
  
"Good, it's settled then." Claire nodded solemnly.  
  
Rebecca was laughing good-naturedly at their silliness. She was also pouring Claire soda. Claire accepted it politely but didn't drink it, exchanging an eyebrow raise with Leon. Rebecca's heart was in the right place, but no one could figure out where the hell her brain was.  
  
The entire thing was an experiment in what could be called "quality time". It involved pizza, beer, soft drinks, a 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit, and the people Claire Redfield had come to call her family. No one at the table was currently armed, but there were weapons in easy reach "just in case". Claire wasn't really sure what the "just in case" might turn out to be, but she hoped the pizza guy watched his back, at any rate.  
  
Chris and Jill were now engaged in a staring contest. If Chris' eyes kept dropping every so often, it was Jill's own fault for wearing that tube top. Or maybe she'd worn it on purpose, just for that reason. Jill Valentine was not entirely guiltless of the wisdom of the serpent.  
  
Claire's own tube top read "Aeropostale Athletics" and was her trademark shade of pink, but she'd worn it solely for comfort. It wasn't as if she were trying to impress anyone, anyway...  
  
Like a visual aid, Leon got a beer from the refrigerator and stretched. The tank top he was wearing showed his hard arms to perfection. Claire let her eyes sweep down his jeans to his sneakers and back up again. She constantly wanted to brush his long bangs out of his drowning blue eyes--they'd fall again and she'd brush them aside again, over and over, a constant reason to touch him.  
  
She smiled softly at her own musings. She'd never do that. She'd never say any of that out loud. Zombies were scary, but this love thing might kill her yet.  
  
Chris' gaze was still leaping from Jill's wide, clear eyes to her cleavage and back again. He was wearing a white shirt, jeans, and a pair of less than reputable shoes. Claire wanted him to throw them away, but if Jill couldn't get him to do so than it was entirely possible that no one could.   
  
After the board was finally set up and all the wedges pried out of the pieces, they were ready to start.  
  
Claire reached across the table for the pink playing piece.  
  
Rebecca tittered. "Pink, Claire? I'm surprised at you!"  
  
Claire blinked, looking down at her tube top and reading "Aeropostale Athletics" upside down. Looking back at Rebecca, she said, "I'm always the pink piece, or I don't play. It's in the rules."  
  
"The rules?" Barry looked over the sheet of rules. Written in black ink, in the handwriting of a much younger Claire, was the added rule, "Claire is always the pink piece."  
  
Leon laughed. Claire smiled, placing her piece in the center of the board.  
  
"It's just that I don't think pink when I think of you," Rebecca continued.   
  
Claire's smile wavered, like a flickering electric candle. "What?"  
  
Rebecca shrugged her slim shoulders. "I don't know. It's just that...you know. Everything that's happened. All we've been through. All we've done. It's not pink. You survived Raccoon. You carry a gun. You're not pink, Claire."  
  
Claire's smile returned, but there was something with claws in it now. "No, I guess not."  
  
Leon saw something sleek and fanged move behind Claire's hurricane eyes and was reaching for her hand when Chris mercifully jumped in. "Claire's bedroom was pink, when we were younger. And somewhere, there is a video of a kindergarten dance recital, where she's in a leotard the color of cotton candy. I think you were supposed to be a mermaid, right, Claire?" the elder Redfield teased.  
  
Claire blushed and swatted at her brother. "Chris. Don't."  
  
Leon smiled at her, shaking his head, causing his bangs to fall into his eyes. "No way," he said in disbelief.  
  
Claire nodded with a wry smile. "Believe it. I went to dance lessons for a year. Then they changed my school hours to p.m. kindergarten and I couldn't go to dance class any more." She laughed softly, remembering.  
  
Leon saw the warmth of the memory in her wolf's-fur eyes, and could suddenly picture her graceful body in a ballet, instead of a battle. The waste, the utter waste of that potential hurt him, hurt him for her. He wanted to take Claire's hand, brush his lips across her knuckles and tell her everything was all right, but he knew now was not the time. A moment like that would be only for the two of them, and he didn't want to share her with anyone.  
  
Instead, he glared at Rebecca, which did little to comfort him, but for now a little was enough.  
  
Chris again mercifully broke the silence by pointing at Jill, then at the table. "You. Down."  
  
Jill shook her head. "No way. Roll the dice, Redfield."  
  
*****  
  
"All the pretty colors..." Claire spun her piece around on the board. She had four out of the six wedges, easily beating Jill's three and Chris' one. Leon was winning with five out of six. Barry also had four, and Rebecca's piece was decidedly...empty.  
  
Like her head, Claire thought with a mental frown. She looked at Leon's piece, the blue one. Blue, she wondered. How could that flat color, that dull, ordinary, bland color be called blue?   
  
She turned to look at Leon and saw real blue sleeping in the depths of his eyes. Once you saw blue like that, not even the sea came close.  
  
"This is so unfair," Chris exploded. "This version is so old that the answer to everything is Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, or Madonna. That's the only reason you're winning, Kennedy."  
  
"Personally, I think it's because you and Jill are expending too much energy trying to psych each other out," Barry said. Claire agreed, but made a wisecrack:  
  
"Maybe Leon's just smarter than you."  
  
Barry and Rebecca laughed. Jill and Chris snorted at her, looking horrifically alike.  
  
Leon grinned. "You're absolutely correct, Claire, you get to roll again."  
  
She laughed, reaching to roll the die. After rolling a five, she let her arm rest on the table, next to Leon's as he reached for his beer. The warm kiss of her arm against his was enough to keep a small smile on his lips for the rest of the game.  
  
*****  
  
"I can't stand you!" Jill cried, throwing a dishcloth at the elder Redfield.   
  
"It's mutual!" Chris folded his arms over his chest.   
  
"Um...I take it the game is over," Rebecca said timidly.  
  
Claire shook her head in embarrassment. "Balderdash is when things REALLY get out of hand."  
  
Barry was trying not to laugh, the effort shaking his huge frame.   
  
"They'll go on like this for hours, then spend the rest of the night 'making up'," Claire grumbled. "Looks like I'm spending the night on the sofa. I KNEW I shouldn't have taken the room next to theirs." She looked at Barry. "Go ahead. You're going to hurt yourself."  
  
Barry gave up and laughed, a warm growling chuckle that filled the whole room.  
  
*****  
  
Claire was stationed on the sofa with a blanket when Leon found her. "I come bearing flowers," he said, holding out two spoons.  
  
"Those look like spoons," Claire said with a chuckle.  
  
"Well, put 'em in this. Maybe they'll grow." He held out a pint of ice cream, Ben and Jerry's Half Baked.  
  
"Ooh, Half Baked. Flowers mean nothing. You can sit with ME," she announced importantly, moving over on the sofa to make room for him.  
  
Leon smiled and reclined beside her. Who said the way to a girl's heart wasn't through her stomach?  
  
Claire dug into the ice cream, making little annoying satisfied sounds.   
  
"Hey, we'd better make that last," Leon warned. "We might not get back into the kitchen for a while. It's a war zone in there."  
  
Claire sighed. "Are they throwing things yet?"  
  
"Almost. We're going to be here a while though."  
  
Claire smiled. "At least we're in good company."  
  
He smiled. "That's sweet."  
  
Claire laughed out loud. "Actually, I was talking about Ben and Jerry, but you'll do."  
  
Leon hit her with a sofa pillow. "Hey!"  
  
She giggled. "I was kidding! I was kidding! You're so sensitive!"  
  
"Don't make me tickle you, Redfield," Leon threatened, hooking his fingers into claws, the way he teased young Sherry Birkin.  
  
"No!" Claire gasped, reaching for the closest weapon--the sofa pillow.  
  
Leon's eyes lit up as if someone had touched a match to them. "You're ticklish?"  
  
"No," Claire insisted quickly, a guilty flash in her eyes betraying her.  
  
"You ARE ticklish," Leon said triumphantly, lunging for her.  
  
It was a sound he'd never heard before: Claire actually squealed. "No! Oh! Leon, don't--DON'T! Ack! Stop it!" The squeal deteriorated into giggles as she squirmed against him. "I mean it, don't! REALLY!" The last hit a pitch usually reserved for calling dogs. Leon hadn't thought Claire's cream-soda voice could go that high.  
  
She was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her cheeks. "I will kill you for this! I am not kidding!"  
  
Leon's fingers danced over her ribs. "Are you ticklish here? What about here?" He reached for her neck.  
  
She managed to find the sofa pillow and whacked him severely around the head and shoulders before falling off the sofa, where she lay laughing and crying and chasing her breath.   
  
Leon sat up slowly, lightheaded from laughter, and reached a hand to her. "Sorry," he panted. "I'm sorry, Claire. Are you hurt?"  
  
"No," she snickered, taking the offered hand. "Fine. You win, I'm ticklish. But you can't tell ANYONE."  
  
"Your secret dies with me," Leon promised with a grin.  
  
She speared him with her eyes. "And if you try to tickle me again, that secret will die sooner than you think."  
  
He laughed. "Yes ma'am."  
  
"You HURT me, you big goof," she laughed, rubbing her stomach.  
  
"You got in a few shots yourself," he countered, showing her his arm, where a few scratches were painting his skin red. "You've got long nails."  
  
"Yeah." Claire smiled and looked at her hands. "They're nice, right? Jill always tells me I should get them done, but I think it's a waste of time." She snorted. "I'll do them myself--maybe I'll paint them PINK." She said it like it was a dirty word.  
  
The smile faded from Leon's face when he heard the tightly leashed pain in her voice. "That's really bothering you, isn't it?" he asked gently.  
  
Claire looked away. "Rebecca's right."  
  
"Rebecca's an idiot," Leon muttered.  
  
"It doesn't matter," Claire said softly, arms wrapping around her knees as she curled back into a corner of the sofa. "I wouldn't change anything if I had it all again, but...I remember when things were pink. Sometimes I wish they could be again."  
  
Leon's eyes were the blue at the bottom of a gas flame, something secret and intense. "You're still pink, Claire."  
  
She shook her head, but he reached out, cupping her chin in his hand and turning her face gently toward him. "You are. There will always be a place, somewhere in you, where things are pink. When you sing lullabies to Sherry, that's pink. When you tease your brother, that's pink. When you let me tickle you, that's pink."  
  
She blinked, her eyes suddenly overcast and shimmering with unshed tears. He wanted to tell her it would be okay to cry, if she wanted to, but there was no way to make her understand...  
  
...or was there?  
  
"It's okay to be pink sometimes, Claire," he said, just above a whisper, tipping her chin up.   
  
She laughed, the movement causing the tears to stand at attention in her eyes. She leaned over, wrapping her arms around in him an impulsive embrace. He was momentarily startled by her actions, but his arms were full of the sweet warmth of her and it was very easy to get used to the hammering of her heart against his. She smelled of cherry almond bath oil and the sleepy warmth of a two a.m. comforter. It shouldn't have been enough to make his world perfect, but it was. Somehow, it was.   
  
Her smile was mischievous and teasing, her eyes leaping like flame as she looked up at him, her chin pressing into his chest. "That pink enough for you?"  
  
He grinned back. "It's a start."  
  
She sighed, squirming into a correct station of karma in his embrace, and rested her cheek against his chest. Her eyes closed slowly, the lashes throwing shadows on her cheek. The rhythm of her breathing was threatening to lull him to sleep. Her heartbeat shook him, shook them both.  
  
"Hope you like me here, cause I'm too tired to go anywhere." She laughed softly against him, another thrilling sensation.  
  
He smiled. "I like you there." He rested his chin on the crown of her head and sighed contentedly, leaning back to recline on the sofa, drawing her with him.   
  
"Leon?"  
  
"Mm?"  
  
"Thanks."  
  
He smoothed her hair, brushing a lock of it out of her eyes. "You're welcome."  
  
The kitchen door did not muffle the sounds of a dying argument. "I think Chris has just raised the white flag," Claire chuckled. Leon couldn't help joining her.  
  
"So, Pinky, anything good on TV tonight?" Leon teased, reaching for the remote.  
  
"Hmm." Claire reached behind Leon's head for the TV Guide. And flipped some pages. "Umm....'Silence of the Lambs' or 'Sweet November'?"  
  
Their eyes met, and Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield shared a moment of perfect understanding.  
  
" 'Silence of the Lambs'."  
  
Okay, not everything had to be pink.  
  
*****  
  
Author's Note:  
  
I love the color pink, and I feel like people don't treat it right. Pink doesn't make you too frilly to play hockey or go hiking; it doesn't mean you're too girlie-pop to listen to Abandoned Pools and Incubus. One of my favorite memories is of climbing a tree in a pink dress when I was fourteen, my red hair flying behind me in the wind.   
  
Please review--be brutal--be honest. I can take it! *^_^* 


End file.
